A user can communicate using one or more different messaging techniques known in the art: email, instant messaging, social network messaging, cellular phone messages, etc. Typically, the user can accumulate a large collection of messages using one or more of these different messaging techniques. This user collection of messages can be presented as a large collection of messages with limited options of grouping or clustering the messages.
One way of grouping messages is to group multiple emails into an email thread. An email thread is a collection of emails that are related based on the subjects of the emails. For example, one user sends an email to one or more users based on a given subject. Another user replies to that email and a computer would mark those two emails as belonging to a thread. Another way for grouping messages is put the messages into folders. This can be done manually by the user or can be done automatically by the user setting up rules for message processing (e.g., an email from user A goes into a folder designated for user A, an email received by a user where the user is on a carbon copy (CC) list is filed into a CC folder, etc.).